The Calligra Office Suite has announced its second snapshot release. The project, which is a fork of KOffice, is building a suite of productivity and creativity applications and is working towards its first formal end-user release due in October. The project is seeking feedback from end users particularly in the area of usability of the GUI. With this snapshot Calligra Office Words is claiming better compatibility with .docx than LibreOffice, and also claims to be approaching the best compatibility with legacy .doc formats.

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But I do need to be able to open MS Office documents received from other people, and send them back documents that they can open. Messed up formatting is unprofessional and unacceptable; documents need to look as they were intended to look.

The only software capable of doing that with reasonable reliability is MS Office itself. That gives it a huge advantage that I can't see disappearing any time soon.

That's the most important point when someone chooses an office suite: being able to use that suite to open documents sent by someone else and keep the same formatting and sending to someone else a document which that person can open and keep the same format.

Any other office suite beside MS Office -either free, open source or commercial - do a very, very poor job when opening doc, docx, xls and ppt. Which is totally unacceptable for anyone but open source zealots.

To add to the shame, MS Office runs faster on Linux under Wine than native Open Office or Libre Office. Ironically, the best office suite for Linux, is MS Office running under Wine or Vmware. "